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Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person

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Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person Mark K. Spencer University of St. Thomas, MN One of the most striking Biblical claims is that we human persons are made in the image and likeness of God. Genesis 1:25-27 tells us that, whereas the animals are made “according to “their kinds,” God resolved to make human persons “according to” (or “towards” or “in”), in His words, “Our image and likeness.”1 This is coupled in verse 26 with the resolution to set us in dominion over all other living creatures, and in verse 27 with the creation of man and woman. The New Testament2 develops this claim: Christ is the image of the invisible God, whereas we are made “according to” this image, (Col 1:15, 3:10). What this image of God in us is has been a perennially debated in the Christian tradition, but accounts of the image of God have been used to support a variety of anthropologies and ethics. Inadequate accounts of the image have often led to or reinforced inadequate anthropologies and ethics. I here outline an account of the image of God that seeks to overcome those inadequate views, and I shall do so by synthesizing some apparently conflicting strands of thought from the Christian tradition. In the Western tradition, following Augustine, the image is generally seen as belonging to the human soul, not the body. An image of God, Augustine reasons, must represent God as He is in Himself. God is a Trinity of consubstantial Persons, so He will be imaged by something three- fold in us, where the three are of one substance. In God, the Father begets His Word, and with and through that Word spirates the Spirit, but all three are of the divine substance. In God’s image, when the mind knows itself or knows God (and such knowledge is always contained in memory), it expresses this in an interior word, which leads to love for self or God. But all three—mind or memory, word, and love—are of the same substance, that of the soul.3 There are reflections of God in the body and in our relationships to things other than God, but these do not image God; the image only belongs to what is highest in us, that by which we are capax Dei.4 1 In Greek: κατ’ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν. In Latin: ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. In Hebrew, the key words are besalmenu, from selem, image, and kidmutenu, from demuth, likeness. 2 Hans Urs von Balthasar in Theo-Drama, v. 2, Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 317-20, claims that the idea of the image of God does not seem to have had much direct influence in the Old Testament, aside from a handful of texts. 3 Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 9.4.4-7, p. 28-30; 12.4.4, p. 84; 14.12.15, p. 153-4; 14.14.18-20, p. 156-8. See Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate (hereafter DV), q. 10 a. 1, for an argument that we image God as Trinity, not just as imaging the perfect image, the Son. All Aquinas citations are from www.corpusthomisticum.org. 4 Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis (hereafter, In Sent.) I d. 3 q. 3 a. 1 ad3; Summa theologiae (hereafter ST), III q. 4 a. 1 ad2. Francisco Suárez says it is the view of the “saints” that we image God in that by which we overcome all bodily things, at Quaestiones disputatae de anima I d. 2 q. 4 n. 13. All Suárez citations are from www.salvadorcastellote.com. The claim that we image God only in the “highest” part of the soul, whereby we are receptive to and contemplate God, is found in many sources: e.g., Philo of Alexandria (see D.T. Runia, “God and Man in Philo of Alexandria,” The Journal of Theological Studies 39 [1988]: 48-75), in the medieval mystics, and in contemporary Thomists (see e.g. Andrew Woznicki, Metaphysical Animal, [New York: Peter Lang, 1996], 65-68). The Saint Anselm Journal 13.2 (Spring 2018) 1 Other Fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa who sees the image in our freedom,5 also restrict the image to our souls, but this view has recently been challenged.6 Many now see the Bible as claiming that man, the whole human person, body no less than soul, images God not just in something in him or herself, but by relating to God and other persons; evidence for this is that in Genesis the image of God is linked to our relations involving dominion and sexuality.7 It is further reasoned that the writer of Genesis had no knowledge of the Trinity or the Incarnation, and so ‘the image of God’ cannot, at least in its primary meaning, refer to these;8 some worry that Augustine reads Christian dogmas into his account of the human person, rather than seeing the image as we actually experience it.9 From the New Testament it is reasoned that if Christ is the image Who makes visible the invisible God, then we who are made according to this image must in a way similar to the Incarnate Christ make God visible—but that would involve our bodies, the visible part of us, in the image. Furthermore, Christ reveals that God is a communion of Persons—and so we image God best not alone, in our souls, but in a communion of persons.10 Rejecting the Augustinian approach is further motivated by examining how we are presented to ourselves in experience, as considered by the phenomenologists. The Biblical claim, it is supposed, expresses something perceivable in persons. We perceive the other as made in the image of God when we see his or her dignity11 or mysterious uniqueness. But if the image of God were just in the soul, then these things could not be perceived by others, as in fact they are. Finally, many reject the Augustinian approach by contending that it undergirds an inadequate, dualist anthropology, on which I am primarily my soul, and the body is a mere aid (or prison) to the soul or imitates God only through the soul.12 Such a view seems irreconcilable with the centrality of the body in the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. My goal is to outline a metaphysics in which these views are reconciled and synthesized; on my view, the Augustinian image in our souls is the essential core to the image, but it is also 5 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, c. 16 and John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II c. 12. These citations are from www.newadvent.org. cf. John Meyendorff’s introduction to Gregory Palamas, The Triads (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1983), 14, 18. All citations from the Fathers, unless otherwise indicated, are from the versions on www.newadvent.org. These Greek thinkers are followed in contemporary times by, e.g., Balthasar in Theo-Drama, v. 2, 326-7, who sees us imaging God, Who is infinite freedom, in our finite freedom. 6 Contemporary thinkers distinguish three models for theories of the image of God: substantial models (e.g., Augustine’s, on which the image of God is something in us), relational models (on which the image is in our relation to God or others), and functional models (on which the image of God is in something that we do, e.g., have dominion.) See Olli-Pekka Vainio, “Imago Dei and Human Rationality,” Zygon 49 (2014): 121-34; Ryan S. Peterson, The Imago Dei as Human Identity (Warsaw: Eisenbrauns, 2016). My account includes each of these within a single image. 7 Consider, e.g., the views of Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann (see Dominic Robinson, Understanding the “Imago Dei”, [Burlington: Ashgate, 2011], 31-2, 48, 129, 133, 138), and of G.C. Berkouwer (see Anthony Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 63] and Hoekema’s own view at Image, 75-80. 8 David Ferguson, “Humans Created According to the Imago Dei,” Zygon 48 (2013): 439-53. 9 Thomas Cajetan directly suggests that we know the image of God is an image of the Trinity by starting with the dogma of the Trinity and then finding its image in us, rather than perceiving that image directly: see Expositio super summam theologiam v. 5, Opera omnia Thomae Aquinatis, I q. 93 a. 5, (Rome: Leonine edition, 1889), 406. 10 For these claims, see the section on phenomenological accounts of the image below. 11 Cf. Gen 9:6 and James 3:9. 12 See Augustine, Trinity, 14.19.25, p. 164-5. For an argument that Augustine, in his account of the image, forgets our animality and presages Cartesian dualism, see the phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham, 2016), 89-90. The Saint Anselm Journal 13.2 (Spring 2018) 2 present in our bodies and relationships, such that it is perceivable in and belongs to the whole person. In working out this synthesis, I build especially on the work of Thomas Aquinas who, more than others in the tradition, lays a groundwork for seeing the image in the whole person. This synthesis will avoid three13 problematic anthropologies that many Christian thinkers have held; they are problematic because they are phenomenologically inadequate—that is, they fail to fully cohere with and explain our experience. The first problematic anthropology is any dualism in which the image of God is only in the soul; such a view fails to grasp how the human person is given experientially as a holistic unity.
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